Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today

Chapter 15. Making a Choice

Chapter 15 Making a Choice 15.1 EXPANSION OF THE PROPOSED SOLUTION William James advised that when certitude is not attainable—as it seldom is in philosophy—the most reasonable position to take is the one that is the most intellectually satisfying.1 I think he did not mean the most comfortable , an intellectual old shoe, but the most revealing, even perhaps the most exciting. And I note that the late Thomas Gold, astronomer and highly original cosmologist, is reported to have said, “In choosing a hypothesis, there isn’t any virtue in being timid.” All things considered, then, I judge that what I have termed the “Whiteheadian-type solution” is the most intellectually satisfying of the three options.2 Permit me to set it once again in context, and to expand on it for the sake of clarity and to show its plausibility. Finally, I shall endeavor to meet objections against it. As I mentioned in section 13.2, Whitehead is usually understood to have the nascent actual entity feel God in God’s feelings for it. That, I think, is a profound idea, but can it be 99 Felt-15 7/27/07 2:54 PM Page 99 given an interpretation analogously appropriate to the perspective I am here trying to work out? I essay the following. First, we are not dealing here with the experiences of an already constituted primary being but with that very constitution itself. (Recall from section 13.1 the restriction of the discussion to esse, the primary being’s “first act.”) This first act of existing is not an experience in the ordinary sense of the word, let alone is it a “feeling.” It does however have what I have called an essential character, the natural correlate to its essential aim. It is filtered, so to speak, by that aim. Second, the nascent primary being does not arise in a vacuum but out of a particular past world of factuality. That world lays the conditions of possibility for value realization in the future. Now Whitehead conceives that what he calls God, in his “consequent nature,” feels (experiences) that same world out of which the new primary being arises. I think that Aquinas too would basically agree with this (at least if we take “feels” simply in the sense of “is aware of, including its value dimension”), inasmuch as he argues that since the cause is simultaneous with its effect, and since God, as the primary cause, is at work in every causal event, God is in that sense everywhere.3 Whitehead’s God at the same time and by reason of his “primordial nature,” feels the spectrum of possibilities for experiential value achievement for that nascent being, and thereby feels for—inclines toward—the better possibilities. If one then supposes, as Whitehead apparently does, that the newly forming being feels God’s feelings for it and its own future , then that is identical with the being itself being provided with its essential aim (Whitehead’s “initial aim”), the feeling for its own self-ideal aiming at the immediate future.4 I think it would be possible to save the essence of this idea without introducing a Thomistically unacceptable activity of the world upon God or of the primary being’s literally feeling God. For I can conceive Alpha as being experientially aware of the nascent being’s situation in the world, together with Alpha’s recognition of the entire matrix of value possibilities — A I M S 100 100 Felt-15 7/27/07 2:54 PM Page 100 in their interrelations. Since Alpha’s aim in the world is value achievement (a concept shared by both Aquinas and Whitehead ), it is plausible that Alpha would furnish to each newly forming primary being an attraction (essential aim) toward that particular way of existing in which it would be most existentially enriched. Such an attraction is a way of receiving participated existing and forms a necessary aspect of Alpha’s furnishing existence (esse) to the being. Since Alpha (like Aquinas’s “God”) alone is the source of existing, Alpha must furnish to every primary being its act of existing. But such an act of existing is necessarily limited to existing in just this way or that, so that Alpha’s providing the primary being with its essential aim is simply an aspect of Alpha’s creative act for it. Alpha orients the...